A Readable Cover For Your Book Online
Biff Barnes
Book marketing expert John Kremer looks at some highly promoted recent books in a post on his Book Marketing bestsellers. What he sees leads him to ask a question about book titles: “Should you be able to read them?”
Kremer examines half-a-dozen covers and finds that in many cases reading the title or the name of the author can be a chancy proposition. Let’s look at an example:
Says Kremer, “Jonathan Harr’s title is unreadable at this size (the size in most catalogs and websites). I think it says something like The Lost Painting, but I cheated. I made the graphic larger to make out the last word.”
He raises an important point. As more and more books are sold online what makes for a successful cover is changing. Covers were once designed to appeal to bookstore buyers who picked the book up and examined it. But with the shift to web sales cover designs have to display well in thumbnails and at low resolution.
When you work with your cover designer, make sure that the appearance of your book online is an important element of your discussion.
Stories To Tell provides jpeg images of the front cover of every book we design in both high resolution and web resolution for author use in marketing.”
Click here to see the rest of the covers and John Kremer’s assessment of them.